Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen

Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen is Professor of Applied Linguistics in Education at the Department of Education. She Joined the University of Bath in September 2017. Prior to her current position, she held academic posts at the University of Reading (UK); National Institute of Education/Nanyang Technological University (Singapore); and McGill University (Canada).

Her research interests encompass ideological, sociocultural-cognitive and policy perspectives on language learning with particular focus on children’s multilingual education and biliteracy development. Within these broad perspectives, her research addresses three main issues:

• What education policy in general and language-in-education policy in particular provide affordances or constraints in supporting minority language learners to narrow the education gap?
• How do various linguistic and non-linguistic forces influence and interact with macro, meso and micro-level language policy and classroom policy to facilitate or inhibit literacy and language development?
• How do teachers’ and parents’ ideological convictions affect their socialisation and pedagogical practices, and how are these convictions reflected in their discursive practices?

To address these three broad research issues, she has examined language policies in mainstream schools and transnational migration contexts in Quebec, France, Singapore and the UK on topics of curriculum policy, language-in-educational policy and family language policy. Committed to migrant children’s overall social and academic wellbeing, her recent research projects have examined how language policy at national, educational, and institutional levels impact on individual agency.

She is the principal investigator of an ESRC funded project entitled Family Language Policy: A Multi-Level Investigation of Multilingual Practices in Transnational Families.